Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on Markets leadership and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 250 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now, welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Those of our listeners who've heard the span of our podcasts over six years might note that today represents the 400th episode of Inside the ICE House, a record of conversations with entrepreneurs, visionaries, and leaders who've walked through our doors here at the New York Stock Exchange ever since Tom Farley, then president of the NYSE, served as our guinea pig back on episode one all the way back on February 5th, 2018. Now I bucket our guests in roughly 20 categories, from presidents to pioneers, from traders to market mavens, from investors to innovators, and 12 other groups I won't even bother to mention here and now. So as we are pondering who might sit in the chair across from me for this, the 400th time tuning on our microphones as we begin the year 2024, we also noted the symbiosis with the extraordinary neighborhood and city in which we find ourselves.
We often talk about the big date that defines the intersection of Wall and Broad streets, where the current New York Stock Exchange founded on May 17th, 1792 currently sits. That date happened three years earlier, April 30th, 1789 at 2 P.M. when a military salute started at Fort George, followed by a procession from Franklin House to Federal Hall. Then Chancellor Robert Livingston administered the oath of office to the first President of the United States, George Washington of Virginia. But the more seminal event for the city itself happened 168 years, even before that, 1624.
That's when the Dutch Republic established New Amsterdam right here on the southern tip of the island of Manhattan as the capital of New Netherland, its colony to defend the fur trade operations of the Dutch West India Company. 30 years later, 1665, the population of New Amsterdam had skyrocketed to 1500 people, right before four English frigates sailed into the harbor, took it over in a bloodless capture and named the place New York after the then Duke of York. Population today, 400 years after the Dutch Rule formally began, about 8.4 million people, 20.1 million if you consider the entire metropolitan statistical area ranking at the ninth largest city in the world behind Tokyo, Jakarta, Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Lagos.
Now give those cities their due, but on the world stage as the beating heart of commerce and capitalism for 400 years, does any place really top the big apple? Sure, London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing and Buenos Aires have their charms, but they can't claim the qualifier. As Frank Sinatra said, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. That, my friends, is New York, New York. Today on the show to honor the 400th anniversary of New York City will survey its highs and lows from Columbia Heights to Battery Park, joined by Dr. Kenneth T. Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History at Columbia University, where he has also chaired the Department of History. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. As you just heard from my tease, our guest today is Dr. Kenneth T. Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History at Columbia University. I heard Dr. Jackson speak a couple of weeks ago at an event at Federal Hall. Looking forward to America's 250th anniversary in 2026, and was so captivated, not so much by the magnitude of the semi-quincentennial of the United States, but more parochially, the 400th anniversary of our fair city. Listening to Ken roll out the story of this island, I found myself transported to many different epochs and eras of this thirteen-mile Long Island and its surrounding boroughs, and thought there'd be no better person with whom to share our 400th episode.
Dr. Jackson hails from Memphis, a product of the University of Memphis, and received his PhD from the University of Chicago, serving as an officer in the US Air Force for three years before joining the Columbia faculty as an adjunct professor in 1968. The author of a small library of books that bear his name, including the 2 million word, 1,373 page Encyclopedia of New York History, Ken's career at Columbia extends to the present day where in 2016 he received the university's highest honor, named for another fellow who made a big impact on this neighborhood, the Alexander Hamilton Medal. Welcome, sir, Inside the ICE House. We have a lot of history to cover.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
Josh King:
We're going to span 400 years, 1624 to 2024 in which we'll surely be a too brief conversation, Ken. But let's plop down for a moment to April 30th, 1789 and May 17th, 1792 to get it once and for all from the definitive source, because I regularly mangle history as I'm sitting in this room from this microphone, so we have it on record from the oracle. What significance do you apply to Washington's inauguration in Caddy Corner from here, and what does the founding of the New York Stock Exchange mean to the city's endurance as the world financial capital?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, few people realized that New York was the first capital of what called the United States. It was just temporary. I mean, for less than two years. Then it was going to move to Philadelphia for a few years before the permanent capital was going to be in Washington. By the way, a deal that Alexander Hamilton helped moderate that the federal government would assume state debts from the American Revolution if they moved to the Capitol to really what was in a swamp in Virginia. And so that was a major decision right there, but that helped make New York the capital and New York had been the center really in some ways of the American Revolution. We associated with Lexington and Concord and the Boston Massacre and the Battle of Bunker Hill in Boston are with Valley Forge and the Liberty Bell and Constitution Hall in Philadelphia. But the revolution itself, which we say began in 1776, really was centered around New York, not because it was the greatest city yet in the country of the world, but because of its location.
It is on the river, not just a river. All cities are mostly on rivers. But this river goes somewhere. It goes north for a couple a hundred miles, and it connects to what later became the Erie Canal. So that New York was connected to Chicago and Detroit when they came to be in existence. And Boston and Philadelphia could not get across the mountains, so that made a big difference. So anyway, the city was the first capital of the United States. The inauguration of George Washington was a symbol of that. George Washington and the British both realized when the war started, Bunker Hill to them was kind of a skirmish. Once the British High Command realized they were in for a real fight, then they looked at the map and they said ... Well, at the time, the two most important colonies were Virginia and Massachusetts. And they looked at the map and they say, "There's the great Harbor."
In some ways, this is the greatest harbor in the world. Halifax is one, but Halifax doesn't connect to anything. San Francisco is one. Hong Kong is one. New York is probably the best, but in any case, it's the most important. But anyway, once the war was begun to gun, the British made at the headquarters of the army and their navy for the entire war, the biggest battle of the American Revolution was fought not far from here across the East River in Brooklyn in August of 1776. Most Americans don't know much about it. We know much more about Battle of Princeton or Saratoga or Bunker Hill. But the Battle of Brooklyn was the biggie.
And the reason we never heard of it is because we lost. Not only did we lose, we lost badly. And that was in 1776. And much of the war was fought around the Hudson Valley, kind of up the Hudson River from New York City. Trying to keep the colonists divided, the Royal Navy was of course in charge of the water wherever they were, and New York is in British hands the entire war. Philadelphia was continental, then British, then back and forth. Boston was continental city the entire war. So New York had a different experience, but a very important experience.
Josh King:
As I said in the intro, Ken, you hail from the city that the boy from Tupelo, Elvis Presley made famous with his home at Graceland and spent time in that Midwestern backwater, they call Chicago, when you were getting your doctorate, but what were your sensations of the city when it finally became your home in 1968?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I went to the University of Chicago and came under the influence of a professor named Richard C. Wade, who was really the founder of urban history in the United States. I mean, there were cities and there was history, but nobody kind of connected the dots. And his argument was that we'd written about a lot of senators and governors, but what about cities? Because the United States was unusual in the size of its cities. In 1900, for example, New York and Chicago were both among the 10 largest cities in the world, so it was not minor. Anyway, he was kind of like a Pied Piper. And I wrote my dissertation on something called the Ku Klux Klan in the city that we knew that was a southern organization, but it was the biggest in the 1920s. And at the time, it was Chicago in Indianapolis and Detroit and Portland, Oregon and Denver, Colorado.
There were the real centers of Klan influence. And he told me to start working on the Klan in Chicago. I thought he was crazy, but he was right. It really was. The biggest Klan was in Chicago, Detroit, Mississippi and South Carolina, where we might've thought the Klan would've been. Actually, the 1920s were kind of a down period, and Black Americans were kind of in a subservient role. And meanwhile, cities were changing a lot of Catholics, a lot of Jews and Blacks moving there. So there was in some ways the same kind of uncertainty and unrest there is in our own time in the 1920s, and the Klan seemed to promise we can solve all this problem. Well, of course they couldn't, but for $10 they could give you a white robe and a mask and make you feel like you were striking a blow for patriotism.
It only lasted for a few years, but that's what got ... Then when I got my dissertation, I had to go in the Air Force. That was back in the 1960s when there was such a thing as a draft. And so I thought maybe it'd be better to be an officer. I didn't know if I had the courage to be a Marine or a grunt in the Army. So I went to graduate school on a military delayed, and I was already a commissioned officer, but every six months, they had to allow me to spend six more months in graduate school. So I kind of set a record for how fast I went through graduate school because the Air Force didn't give a hoot.
Josh King:
Were you based in continental United States?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Yes, entirely. Mostly at a big base. It's still extremely large in the 21st century called Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
Josh King:
Ohio.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Which is in Dayton, Ohio. I had 20 something generals on it when I was there and a few admirals. Still does. The military is much diminished now than it was then. That was a good experience, and I liked it. When I was looking for a job however, I had been able to revise my dissertation and publish it as a book. So when I was on the job market in 1968, I was ahead of most competitors because they usually were ABD, all but dissertation. I had a dissertation, I had a degree, I had a book. I looked pretty good, and I'd been a professor of logistics management in the Air Force. So turned out I had a number of choices. The most notable was the University of Virginia, and as a southern boy that had a lot of appeal. But I wanted to teach about cities, and I thought, if I'm going to wind up at the University of Iowa or Wabash College in Indiana or somewhere like that, I need to say I once lived in a real city and lived in an apartment building.
So I took the offer from Columbia thinking I would only be here for two or three years. I would not get tenure. But when I went wherever I was going to go, I could say, I know where the A train goes, and I know something about real cities, and that's what I did. But what happened is my wife, who's also from Memphis, she and I both fell in love with the city, New York City. You can't be responsible for where you're born, but you can have something to say about where you live. And it turned out it was like a match. I made a great marriage and I had a great job at Columbia, one of the greatest history departments in the world, and I loved the city and got tenure when I was 30 years old, which is really young.
It was pure luck, by the way, because a lot of big universities were trying to establish urban history as a subject. And why does New York ... NYU had a guy named Baird Steele, who was also wonderful and much older whom I worked with and for, but that's how I came to New York. I'd never been here before. I didn't plan to stay. But even with job offers for other places, we decided this was our home and this is where we wanted to stay. And we've been here, well, more than a half a century.
Josh King:
You quoted John Steinbeck in your talk at Federal Hall who wrote, I'm going to lift the quote that you used. "It is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal. Its politics are used to frighten children. Its traffic is madness. Its competition is murderous. But there's one thing about it. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no other place is good enough." Ken, as so many members of the financial community decamped to South Florida during the COVID pandemic, do you think that still holds true what Steinbeck wrote?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
I do. I think the city, even now in 2024, the streets in Midtown Manhattan are twice as busy as any place else in the United States, actually more than twice as busy. So New York is really a different kind of a city. Well, I kid people by saying Chicago is closer to being a farm than it is New York City in the sense that it's less than half as dense as New York. So in a way, you could argue that New York, it is an American, it's clearly the most important city in America, but it's really a world city. It's really connections to London and Singapore and Hong Kong are probably every bit as strong as they are to Chicago and Buffalo and places like that. And I think what makes New York attractive to young people ... Well, there are several things, and it goes back to the Dutch 400 years ago.
The Dutch founded New Amsterdam, Ford Amsterdam initially, not to save souls as the Puritans did in Boston, or they were pilgrims later, religious people, but to make money. And it was a trading post for the Dutch West India company and because they wanted to make money. It's kind of like today, I'm selling hot dogs on the street. Do I care if you're Jewish, have purple hair or gay or dressed weirdly, whatever? I'm here to make a living. I'm standing in the cold. Yes, I'm going to sell you a hot dog. That was really the way they were. And when Peter Stuyvesant objected to Jewish presence in New York, and also, if you believe it or not, Quakers, Quakers were considered obnoxious in the 17th century, they appealed to Stuyvesant, and the Dutch overruled him. Said if the Jews and the Quakers are not bothering anybody, leave them alone and let's just trade.
And that's set New York apart. So think of New York's unusual characteristics. It's diverse. There's really no other city in the world that's as diverse as New York. I know Miami is about 60% foreign born, but they're all from Cuba. Los Angeles has millions, but they're mostly from Mexico or Vietnam and places like that. London and Paris are quite ... all you have to do is ride the underground in both cities, and you can see those are diverse cities now. So are Sydney and Melbourne and Toronto and Vancouver, but they've always been ... It's more of a recent phenomenon there. New York was diverse-
Josh King:
From Stuyvesant.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Yeah. In the 17th century. Not just diverse, but also relatively tolerant. In other words, it's not that everybody in New York loves each other. Of course they don't, but they don't kill each other. The amazing thing about New York is that you put all the people in the world, and I mean, literally all the people in the world, even Estonia, which doesn't have as many people is third of Westchester County, there's an Estonian house in New York, in all the places, and it's everybody's second home. That was Dan Doctoroff and Mike Bloomberg's theme for the Olympics when they tried to get them for 2012. And that's true.
Everybody can come to New York and find a neighborhood where they serve your food, speak your language, you can go to your religious institution and feel at home. And that's pretty unusual. And the other thing I think is that they don't fight. We think of the Indians and the Pakistanians who are ready to have a nuclear war over Kashmir. They're all in New York, they're all in Queens. They're all in Jackson Heights. But you know what they say, nobody over here knows where Kashmir is or gives a hoot about it. So why don't we try to make a living and buy a house or buy a car or whatever, and let's just let that sleeping dog lie. Same way with the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Slovakians, they've been killing each other within the last 30 years in what used to be Yugoslavia. In a town called Mostar that I was in.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
You know Mostar, okay.
Josh King:
I've been to Mostar.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, there's a little river that runs through it. There's a diver who tries to dive in the water, but it's not even 40 feet wide. It's a really narrow, it's a poor excuse for a river. The Muslims are on one side and the Christians on another. They blew each other to smithereens in 1992, so that the parks on one side of the river are turned into cemeteries. Same with the parks on the other side. Well, you know what, they're all in New York. They're all mostly in Queens too, and they don't fight about it over here. And even the Jews and the Muslims, you would think, with the issues we have today, they've been almost no violent incidents. There were a couple. There was a young Hasidic boy who was shot and killed on the Brooklyn Bridge about 30 years ago. There was another rabbinical student from Australia who was beaten to death, but this is over a third of a century.
It's not like every other day, but they all shop on the street in Brooklyn. But anyway, there's just a kind of agreement in New York to not fight. And it wasn't like it was always pleasant. In the 1930s, the Italians and the Jews fought in neighborhoods and the Irish and everybody did. They didn't like each other. There's even less violence now ethnically than there used to be. And I think that's one reason ... It's the United States is an experiment itself to say that we can bring all the people coming across the new grand and somehow let them settle in this country, and they can become Americans.
You can't become French next week. You can't become German or Russian or Ukrainian or Israeli like this, but you can in the United States. Or Japan or Korea, but in the United States, you can. And in New York City, it's doubled. We've got in the 19th century, we had more Irish than Dublin. More Italians than Naples, more Germans than Hamburg. It's just extraordinary. They used to be a million people in the huge ethnic neighborhoods that still exist in New York. My favorite's little Italy in the Bronx, Arthur Avenue, but the Lower East Side is now changing, but the quintessential Jewish neighborhood. Anyway, New York has this diversity, has this toleration and has the density. There are other things, the location's still here on the river, on the-
Josh King:
We're going to get to a lot of aspects of the density, the geography, the history. We're going to plop around to a bunch of different dates, and we're going to go back to the time of Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam. Before we really get into that, Ken, just plop again into that moment that you arrived here, 1968. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in your hometown of Memphis on April 4th. There were riots here, also, Baltimore Louisville, Kansas City, and across the nation. How did the campus of Columbia feel back then compared to what we're seeing on Ivy League campuses today?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I was in the Air Force on active duty, and some of my students were killed. They were mostly career Air Force officers. And I was teased when I left for New York that I was going to a war zone because Columbia itself was ... there was a whole issue of life, not a whole issue, but Cover Story and Life Magazine about the Columbia riots in the spring of 1968, about Vietnam, about its expansion into Morningside Park, and in some ways more volatile than it is today. And today, there are issues between the Palestinians and the Jews and including a lot of other people. But I think a university is a place, if any place is where you should be able to disagree in peace. And it's hard. It's really hard. But I think the universities will come through it okay, and I think New York will retain its attractiveness as will. I mean, I can't imagine Harvard's going to really go into a sharp decline with $50 billion in 400 years of history and hundreds of Nobel Prize winners.
Josh King:
They're just a little worried that their early decision applications were down by 17% or something.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I know they were, and they're perhaps going to be like Columbia too. But the thing is, they were getting so many, it was impossible to get in those schools. It's now that even though the college enrollment in the United States is down just a little bit, total enrollment, the numbers at the 100, let's say leading schools, applications are up. So it's kind of like the top a hundred thousand American students are 200,000, all want to go to the same place. So I think they'll be okay, and maybe a little more of the prestige and funds will get spread around a little bit. But I think the universities, like the cities are going to be okay.
Josh King:
Let's drop into the commander in chief of the Continental Army in early months of 1776. He's got these diggers in Brooklyn, fortifying Brooklyn, Heights, getting ready for the Howe Brothers when they show up with their fleets. What's General George Washington doing? Is he miscalculating the effect of naval occupation of New York Harbor?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I used to pose that question to my students. What would you do if you were George Washington and sitting maybe right where we are, not the building, but right on Broad Street, looking across the water, seeing 300 British ships in the harbor, not counting 30 men of war, which are those guns with triple rows of guns on them. And the Cannons could have devastated New York City, but the British were a little bit cautious. I don't think the United States would've remained a colony of England for the 19th century because it was too big and too large. That doesn't make a lot of sense. But clearly, the war could have ended in 1776 because after the war started, both the British and George Washington's army moved to New York because they could see its critical position in the middle. So George Washington is sitting here. The British have moved a big fleet, 30,000 soldiers. That's a big army. These are professional soldiers.
Josh King:
And the Hessians.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
And the Hessians are with their big boots and big hats and stuff like that. Germans. And they kind of put themselves in anchor for a while. It would like the 800 pound gorilla. They went to Staten Island mostly and put their tents up, and finally decided in late August, they would attack. Well, why Brooklyn and why not Manhattan? Well, because Governor's Island had American guns on him. And even though the British ... I mean, I'm not an admiral and don't know what they knew, but it seemed to me that they lacked the courage to send a couple of those big warships into the East River, in other words between Governor's Island and just said, "Okay, we'll take some fire. That's what we do. We're professional sailors. And meanwhile we'll fire back, but let them see what they can do." They didn't do that. They wanted to land their army on the southern part of Brooklyn, march North through what's now the big Prospect Park in Greenwood Cemetery North, where George Washington's army was going to meet them.
What they hoped was to keep away from Governor's Island, because if once the British got Brooklyn, then they could just row over to Brooklyn to Governor's Island and knock out the guns. Now, the British warships could come through and blast away at Manhattan. But anyway, they didn't. So they had a battle. The British won easily. The Americans actually, many of them ran. Despite what we're taught in our school textbooks about Americans are so clever hiding behind trees and rocks, and the British stupidly march forward. The truth was we couldn't fight a professional soldier. Those were people who knew what they were doing, and they had professional officers and stuff like that. So what George Washington experienced, he wasn't actually in Brooklyn most of the time, was that the Americans fled, but for the courage of Maryland regiment at what's called the Old Stone House in Brooklyn now, they would've just rolled up the American line, but they kind of held.
So the American army is in Brooklyn Heights, what we call Brooklyn Heights. I guess you'd call that the northwest corner of the Western edge of Brooklyn. But meanwhile, the British have all these ships and they have all these soldiers. They've already kicked our rears in the biggest battle called the Battle of Brooklyn. What to do? Well, the General Howe sits on it, and Admiral Howell, they were brothers, as you said, for whatever reason, decided not to be aggressive. He should have sent just two of his 30 warships into the East River and challenged the American batteries because those ships had upwards of a hundred guns on them, 50 on each side, and they could have probably outgunned the guns on Manhattan. They were powerful. Those little wooden warships were powerful things, but he didn't do it.
Secondly, General Howe didn't attack immediately. So there was a famous escape across the East River. Under darkness, they had some brave soldiers who kind of made a lot of noise to fool the British into thinking we were still there back and forth all night long under cover of fog and darkness. Even a cannon went off by mistake. Somehow we escaped that. The British didn't do anything. So the next morning, the Continental army is in Manhattan, and the British Army is in Brooklyn. Well, the significance of that is George Washington was learning.
To make it short, we lost another series of less important battles in and around New York. White Plains was one. And he lived or stayed for six weeks in a place called the Morris-Jumel Mansion up around 100 and 65th Street in Manhattan, overlooking what used to be the polar grounds. And I think he stared at the ceiling. It's the only first octagon in the United States by himself. There's no scandal attached to George Washington like there seems to be for everybody else. Staring at the ceiling by himself. "What am I going to do? My men just cannot seem to stand against professional soldiers, and the British have more of than we do, and they have a big fleet too.
I could run away to Ohio dressed as a private citizen and maybe get there and survive this, or I can stay here and they'll presumably hang me if I'm caught or I can adopt a new strategy." And that's what I think he slowly decided he had to do, which Ho Chi Minh copied in Vietnam, which is, can you fight the leading military power in the world with a ragtag bunch of people and no professional soldiers of any kind? And he decided, I'm overstating this, but he decided to hide, not really hide, but to do as the North Viet Cong did, was to stay in the field, harass them on their edges, attack at night, attack small groups, but do not ever risk your main body. I was in the Air Force [inaudible 00:31:38]. All we wanted was for the main body of the Viet Cong to show up because we would've destroyed them with B-52's, I mean, annihilated.
It was an unfair fight. But they didn't make that mistake. Neither did George Washington. He sneaks up on them at Princeton, New Jersey. That was a case, and we celebrate the battle of that. Well, the British thought that was kind of chicken crap, you know what I mean, to attack at night at Christmas. What kind of gentleman are you? Or Saratoga when the British temporarily got away from their base and we surrounded them. So he does that. Valley Forge out of town, the British didn't come out. So really he does for five years, at least till 1781 to Yorktown. He has to be convinced to go to Virginia because he sees the Hudson River Valley as the critical place. The French convinced him, because the French army, a part of it's come in, the French Navy happens to be there strongly than the Royal Navy, but the Royal Navy is not here.
So they both go down to Yorktown and Virginia, together trapped the British and presumably ended the war. But the truth was, as was with the United States and Vietnam, we could have gone back anywhere any day we wanted to, any place we wanted to, done anything we wanted to. And so could the British. They could have come to New York, they're already in New York. They could come to Philadelphia, Boston. But you know what they said? This war is costing us a lot of bodies. It's costing us a lot of money. We got other fish to fry. Let it go. And that's more or less what we decided in Vietnam. And we hit our peak probably in the 1990s. And the British Empire hit its peak in the 19th century in the Victorian era after they had lost the United States.
Josh King:
So we are just on the upswing then as we enter the 19th century, I just finished reacquainting myself with David McCullough's John Adams, the second and third presidents both died on the same day, July 4th, 1826 to the nation's 50th birthday. New York had long since surrendered the Capitol to Philadelphia and then Washington, as you just told me. But what was this town like maybe around 1829, 1830, when as you told us at Federal Hall, the first public transport system appeared in New York City.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
First of all, we're talking small numbers now. Few more than a hundred thousand, but densely populated. Now, the Wall Street area in New York is becoming repopulated. It's now, 60, 90,000 people down here. But that's maybe what it was 200 years ago. But then the population went north as this became a center of finance and business. The neighborhood was changing because New York, if you had asked the average citizen what is going to become the great city in the United States, and let's say you'd ask him as the British evacuated from New York in 1783, the prediction would likely have been Philadelphia. It was bigger than New York City. It was better planned than New York City. Some people said it's better located than New York City, close to the ... Instead, by 1829, New York City had passed up Philadelphia. It's not just the Erie Canal. Erie Canal is the reason, but there's more to it than that.
Right near this spot down in Lower Manhattan, the Black Ball line established regularly scheduled service. That's a shipping service to Britain. Before then that it would be like an airplane today from JFK Airport. If it says it's going to leave at four, you kind of expect it's going to leave at four. I mean, if it's a storm or something, maybe not, but that's a new idea. At that time, the sailboat in South Street would've ... the guy was the captain, and you come and say you want to ship some goods to Liverpool or London or wherever.
I'd say, "When are you going again?" You'd say, "Well, whenever you meet, whenever you want me to go." And he would lie to you more or less, he'd say soon. Soon. But what he really meant was, as soon as I get the crew together, as soon as we have enough of wine, women, and song, and thirdly, and most importantly, when I get enough goods on my ship. The North Atlantic is a wild place. It really is rough. Do I want to endure those storms with half a load? But they did it. They did it. On the day they said at 10 o'clock, even if it was snowing. And that probably as much as anything gave New York, it was better located than Philadelphia and Boston with regard to water. So maybe it would've happened anyway, but including New York becomes the leading port, not just the leading port in the United States, but by the time of the Civil War, the leading port in the world, until the Dutch, again, get it after World War II, but it's still one of the great harbors in the world.
And finally, I should mention the New York Stock Exchange. Philadelphia was home of the first bank of the United States and the second bank of the United States. Suppose you'd known that too. That was true. And finally, the second bank dissolved in 1836. Andrew Jackson didn't like it. New York had already surpassed Philadelphia financially. So in a sense, maybe it was that combination of, I really think entrepreneurship was always there in New York. Another possible factor was New York was the base of the British Army and British Navy, some of those soldiers liked what they saw. And when they went home and they got out of the army or the Navy, they came to New York.
They had connections to London and stuff like that, so they could ... Better than Americans who didn't have the connections. So there are many possible solutions, but what's not a doubt is that New York surges passed Philadelphia. It's about twice as big as Philadelphia. By the time of the Civil War, if you had Brooklyn, then by the 1900, the turn of the century, Chicago has passed Philadelphia, and for a little while, Chicago looks like it's challenging it. And then in 1950s, Los Angeles looks like it's going to be ... None of them actually were ever really seriously challenged. None of them really got more than half the size of New York. And New York ust has something and probably will do okay.
Josh King:
Some of the things that when you're talking about Los Angeles and movies like Chinatown, we haven't touched a little bit on infrastructure. We often take tap water here in New York for granted. I have a place upstate near where the city owns reservoirs. But when you think about 1832 and the cholera epidemic and what engineers like David Bates, Douglas and John Jervis did figuring out how to get water here from 41 miles away in Croton, how did that set the stage for the growth that was going to come?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Quite simply, New York City has the best big city water system in the world, maybe the best. It's really mountain water that's brought in from pipes now all the way to the Adirondacks. Pipes by gravity flow into the city. Consumer reports did a blind tasting, I want to say 25 years ago, I don't remember the exact time. Blind tasting, Perrier and all sorts of the bottled water and New York City water came out number one in taste and in purity. It's probably still the same. It's also tested about every 10 minutes because obviously millions of people are drinking it and the reservoirs are now watched in New York. But it's really a great, great public infrastructure. And if you look at Los Angeles or Phoenix, those places are unsustainable without water. No, you can't have a city without water. There's no such thing. And the problem with Los Angeles is they got their water from the Owens Valley, which was a fertile valley at one point, a hundred miles or so to the northeast, and brought it in by, like New York did, by aqueduct into the LA area.
The problem was that's a desert. And upstate New York is a rainforest. I mean, Manhattan, the island of Manhattan before the white man got here, and we want to remember that the indigenous people were already here, but it was a forest. God made it a forest or nature made it a forest. So if we all die in nerve gas or something else a century or so from now, it'll cover the New York Stock Exchange. There'll be trees everywhere. Who knows what will happen. But New York has great natural advantages that partly why George Washington was here, but partly why the city has grown becomes the busiest harbor. Why do all the immigrants come to New York?
If I was Jewish on the pale of settlement in what's now Poland or Italian or [inaudible 00:40:40] Irish, nobody cared where you want to go. You were going steerage anyway, but the ships were going to New York because it became the world port much more important than ... Well, in fact, they were years in the last part of the 19th century, and the Port of New York handled more foreign trade than all the rest of the United States put together. It wasn't just first. There wasn't a second place. And that's what brought the immigrants, which brought the people and the immigrants helped make the city a great place. But we got away from water. Water still is a great New York City advantage. We don't really know forest fires. We don't know droughts. We have them, but they're petty compared to the Southwest, and we shall see. But I think water is a huge ... That's what the 21st century is likely to be about. 20th century is about oil. 21st century is going to be about water.
Josh King:
I want to talk about the builders for a second. This area in the 1860s and 1870s really was two big cities divided by the East River. There was Manhattan on one side and independent Brooklyn on the other, the first and third-largest cities in the country. When the river iced over, commerce would ground a halt. Those boats that you're talking about couldn't get in and out of their slips. I want to hear a little bit from the late David McCullough on the challenge that this posed.
David McCullough:
They built the bridge because they saw New York City running out of space. Manhattan Island was finite. There was just so much of it, and it was filling up fast, but Brooklyn, it seemed, could expand endlessly out onto Long Island. Therefore, the bridge was built not to get to New York, but to get to Brooklyn. And it was seen as a way of having the city expand into that open space in Brooklyn because nobody had yet imagined a city growing upward instead of out.
Josh King:
What's the contribution, Ken, of John Augustus Roebling to the city we call home?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
First of all, I love David McCullough. I loved him. He died. He was the greatest spokesman for history-
Josh King:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
... that this country has ever had. But I don't think, I mean, I know that there were a couple of times when the East River supposedly froze over, but it's very hard to document that. And there were a couple of people supposedly did it. You didn't want to be one of them, but the main commerce was the Hudson River, which doesn't ever ... There's ice in it, but never freezes. So there's always commerce, which is a big advantage over Boston and Montreal. But the bridge, which is the eighth wonder of the world when it's built, and between 1869 and 1883, in David McCullough's book, the Great Bridge remains the great book on the Great Bridge.
You're right. It's incredible that the first and third-largest cities and Brooklyn voted to become part of that. It was really close. There were 130,000 votes cast, and the difference was less than a thousand votes. But that don't want to make people in Brooklyn angry. But Manhattan carries Brooklyn even today. I mean, the expenses of New York City, their taxes raised in Manhattan cover the five boroughs mostly. It's never been a deal. Developers in Brooklyn wanted to develop it, and they saw an advantage. It's a hugely important field. And Brooklyn has not really suffered because think of all the cities in the Northeastern Midwest in 1950, every single one of them, except New York City, declined in population and status. Even Washington, even Boston, even Philadelphia. But the exception is New York City, more people now in 2020 than it had in 1950. So people left New York, but somebody else took their place.
More people took their place. Brooklyn's pretty much the same. Its population is just about as large as it ever was. It's about to surpass Chicago as the largest city. And Brooklyn itself is much more dense than Chicago, more than twice as dense as Chicago. So Brooklyn is really an attractive place. Everybody I know lives in Brooklyn now. It's hard to believe. I was part of Brooklyn Rediscovery in the 1970s, and it seemed like everybody was leaving Brooklyn. The Dodgers had left in 1957. It seemed like that was a symbol of everything that had gone wrong. The Jews were leaving. Well, now the Jews are coming back, especially the super Orthodox Jews. And I took some of my class number out in Ocean Parkway to Coney Island one day on one Saturday in September some years ago. And as we rode out, it looked like every Jewish person in the world was outside and walking to service that day.
The Jewish population in New York is up, up as it is young people moving there. They want to meet other young people, and they want rents to be a little bit lower. They're a little bit lower. They're not as low as people think in Brooklyn, but Brooklyn has ... I think it was a good ... I know there are people who argue was a great mistake, but I think Brooklyn has prospered because of it's adjacent to New York. And I think also financially, a lot of Wall Street executives live in Brooklyn Heights. That's a pretty easy commute as it was 200 years ago.
Josh King:
You mentioned the people who arrived here from Poland. My great-grandparents arrived at Ellis Island from Lithuania shortly after Ellis Island opened in 1892. And from then until 1954, you talked about them, nearly 12 million immigrants were processed there. I want to hear just a little bit from a few of those immigrants.
Speaker 6:
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I says, "Where am I?"
Speaker 7:
They would come right into the big hall and there they were told to sit and stay there. And they didn't know where they were. It was a new land, but they hadn't been in land. It was just a big hall. And all you could get was tears and crying of the children.
Josh King:
Can that island that sits out there and the 12 million people that it processes, how does that come to be? And it could have been, I guess, in Halifax or Boston or another place, but why does Ellis Island become what it becomes?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, first of all, it really ends in 1924. Some would say 1921. It doesn't officially close until 1950s, but we've cut off the gap. Well, the reason they come here is because, as I say, this is where the ships are going. And many people now say, "Well, my grandparents did it legally. Why don't they do it legally in 2024 when we see every day on the news, the thousands of people anxious to come across?" Well, first of all, there were no requirements then. If you were Black, you couldn't really come. Or if you were Asian, it was different. But if you were coming from Europe, they didn't really care if you were Jewish or Italian or Irish. You just got off the boat and after they had a little cursory physical exam or if your eyes and ears, you waved on through.
But the other thing is, it follows itself. Those Jewish families from what's now Poland, they often followed a rabbi. You can go down to East Broadway on the Lower East Side and see Rabbi so-and-so of Sasaw, or they were that way. You see the same way with Black families from South Carolina. Follow the preacher to Harlem. You just see it with everybody now following ... because you know somebody, you pin to your blouse the address of your aunt somewhere on Essex Street or Ludlow or somewhere down the Lower East Side. You pin it, you're not going to lose it. So when you get here, you can walk really to the Lower East Side if you have to. You can get a taxi, which is really a horse-drawn wagon. But you probably walked, that was precious because you could find somebody who knew you, who knew your language, who knew your parents, who knew your siblings, and who could help you get a job.
And the thing that you had in New York, which we don't have anymore, and it's hurt newcomers now, is you had a political system called the Boss System, and big Tim Sullivan was run the Lower East Side. They would say, "Okay, now you've been here a couple of days. We've caught up on those stories. Time for somebody to get work." So you go to the Ward Clubhouse and you didn't know anybody. You walk in, they could see you were new. Maybe big Tim would be sitting there and he would reach his hand out.
He'd say, "Hi, I'm big Tim Sullivan, or Tim, call me Tim." He was powerful. Everybody knew Tim Sullivan was powerful. He was the most powerful politician almost in New York, back in Ireland or Italy. Politicians didn't care about you or your opinion about anything. And here's the man who's powerful, who's saying, "What can we do for you? You need a job. You need a place to live?" And he's got three guys saying, "Larry, take care of these good people. See if he can help him get a job and a place to live." Well, they could. They were building a subway or they were building buildings. They needed labor. They needed people to do things.
But it's not charity. "I'm not doing this, Larry, just because I love you. I need you. You can do something for me." "God, what is it I, a peasant do for you?" When election day comes, you ask my friends what we want you to do. Well, technically you couldn't be a citizen until we waited five years. But that was technically, the judges were Tammany Hall people too. "Your Honor, I want these people before you, they've all been here five years and swore them in." And they voted. Some of those wards, they would vote 892 to three. And big Tim once said to his [inaudible 00:50:39], he says, "This is one more vote than I expected Harrison to get, or somebody, I'll try to find out who did it." Know what I mean? But they had help and they had friends, and they had languages, and they had institutions, and they had a city that really, at least the job market, that didn't care that they were Polish or Jewish or Italian or Irish. I mean, some people did. Sure, white shoe law firms, you weren't going to become a trader on the New York Stock Exchange yet. But this also is a positive story of the stock exchange.
Josh King:
I want to get to that after the break. After we take a quick break for commercial here, we're going to continue our journey through New York's 400-year history with Dr. Kenneth T. Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History at Columbia University. We've already covered a lot of years. We're going to cover a lot more coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. If you're enjoying this conversation and want to hear more from guests like Ken Jackson, remember to subscribe to the Inside the ICE House Podcast wherever you listen, and give us a five star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. For the break, Ken and I were surveying the span of New York's history from its founding as the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1624, making our way 300 years or so through the wave of immigration forward through Ellis Island in the first 20 years of the 20th century. Ken, I started our conversation asking you to reflect on that moment, May 17th, 1792, when the Buttonwood agreement was signed, bringing the New York Stock Exchange to life. But I want to pick up the conversation. When the exchange seemed to signal the death of everything, the city stood for Black Tuesday, October 20th, 1929. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 8:
Time came when the ticker tape in the broker's office told a new story. It was panic. 16 and a half million shares of stock sold in a single day, sold hopelessly, desperate at any price.
Speaker 9:
Now is the time to buy, I hope you'll have plenty of the wherewithal.
Josh King:
I hope you have plenty of the wherewithal, but a lot of that wherewithal went out the window that day on Black Tuesday, Ken, the roaring '20s seemed to come to a crashing end in the span of about two days when the market plunged 23%. It would not return to those levels of its September 1929 high for 25 years until 1954.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, it is extraordinary. I think one interesting thing though is that the World Depression starts with a collapse on the New York Stock Exchange. That tells us how the stock exchange had become important. Because in a sense, New York had taken over from London about 1917 when the British could no longer finance World War I and J.P. Morgan and others could. But anyway, that's an important time. It's a tough time for New York City. Its city suffers as much as any American city, 25% unemployment. We're not anywhere. We're like one-tenth of that today. It's a tough time. It indicates that the problem of being too dependent on any one sector of the economy, and of course, the stock market has done fabulously well ever since. It has been responsible for much of New York's growth. And I think one of the things most people don't realize about the New York Stock Exchange is there has been prejudice in New York against Jews, against working class, against Irish, a lot of people, and that's true of all of us.
We're all probably going carrying around some prejudice in our head somewhere. But the thing about New York is in many cases, the New York Stock Exchange was a meritocracy because I've talked to many people who didn't even go to college, but somehow they were working on the floor or something like that, and they became part of a specialist company or something like that, and they made a lot of money. Or they didn't go to an Ivy League school or anything. But it didn't matter because that wasn't what Wall Street was about. Wall Street more than anyplace else was, can you do the job? Can you take the pressure? Can you take the hours? Can you live with this? And even while law firms, so you have places like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Salomon, all those kind of companies, which are Jewish, and now it's kind of crossed over.
So it's not like it used to be. But even if the companies, the white shoe law firms and some of those did discriminate, you could start your own firm, your own specialty firm, and Wall Street was the place to do that. So it's been an avenue for wealth for generations of people who were not born to wealth necessarily, but created a lot of it and made a lot of money for the city. Recently, the stock exchange or the financial industry with 5% of the employees in New York were generating more than 20% of the wealth of the income. So it's played a major role in the success of New York City over the years. And that Buttonwood agreement in 1792 turns out to have been important in the 19th century. That New York City really financed the Civil War and had more deaths than any state in the South. So it had a big role at that time.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about financing the Civil War, contributing to recruitment in World War I, contributing to shipbuilding in World War II. There's an indelible photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, a VE Day in New York City, taken in Times Square's, August 14th, 1945. Ken, I've been to the Brooklyn Navy yard of today a couple of times. It's hard to imagine that that place quiet as it is now, turning out battleships like the North Carolina, the Iowa, the New Jersey in quick succession between 1937 and 1944. But paint a picture of this enormous industrial output along the banks of the East River and more generally, New York's contribution to victory in World War II.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I'm thrilled that you asked that question because I really wrote a little book about New York and World War II. The city is important for several reasons. One is it is the biggest industrial city in the world. It's not as industrial as Chicago or Pittsburgh or a lot of the Ruhr Valley in Germany and places like that, but just the sheer size of the city. They weren't making cars or tanks. They're sewing blouses together or making cigars or putting together checks, printing checks. So there's a lot of things going on. So value added by manufacturers is big. During World War II, huge industry, the Brooklyn Navy art called technically the New York Naval Guard had more employees than any place in New York now by about five times. It had 75 thousand people working 24/7. During World War II, as you said, it outproduced Japan. And we know what an industrial titan Japan is now, but if every ... It wasn't just the Brooklyn Navy Yard, that was the biggest, I mean, Bay of Ironworks, Philadelphia, all sorts of places.
But Brooklyn was the busiest. If the United States had lost every ship in the Navy at Pearl Harbor, everything sunk and the Japanese Grand Fleet had lost nothing in the course of World War II, but 1945, it would've been a completely unfair fight because the United States built more than a hundred aircraft carriers, 35 attack carriers, big things like the Intrepid in New York, Harbor now, but we didn't invent, but Penicillin was mostly made by Pfizer in Brooklyn. A lot of the planes, the plywood planes they used as gliders on D-Day, actually the night of D-Day were often made sometimes in Steinway Piano area over there, fighter planes made on Long Island, just busy, uniforms made by Brooks brothers. But what was also important, I think, or two things, one is liberty. Most of the ships, most of the soldiers and almost all the equipment going to fight the Germans in World War II, which is the main event.
You're going to North Africa, you're going to Italy, you're going to England, and then France, they went through New York Harbor. It was the port of embarkation, not a port of embarkation. It's where you went. Now, they were not thinking about the city, but they were in these kind of halfway house camps. One of them was up the river near the Tappan Zee Bridge and one near Rutgers where troop trains would come and disgorge a thousand soldiers or something like that, or more regiments at a time. And the soldiers would stay there for a week or 10 days. And what you're supposed to do is be sure you got all your shots, be sure you got your will, have a medical exam and take two or three days where? Everybody knew where. Where was New York City with its thousands of bars and famous places. And if you see even a painting of New York in the war, you see sailor suits and soldiers everywhere.
And by the way, the Brooklyn Navy yard repaired ships too and just build them. So while the ships were being repaired, the sailors were often on leave in New York, and it was a great place for that. And then this is where the convoys formed. The German Navy was like most of Germany's military operations, first class and their submarine force, the U-boats had the highest death rate of any service in any country in World War II. Almost three quarters of them were killed in the war, but they were good at what they did. Anyway, to go across the North Atlantic was a scary thing for a while. They even sank tankers near the harbor, but they really couldn't operate off the New York Coast because it took too long to get here and they used up most of their fuel. So it took a week or so to two weeks to get here, and then they had a week on station, had to go back.
So that was in an inefficient way to use their resources. But nevertheless, we were worried about German battleships, the Bismarck or something breaking up. So what would happen is they would go out maybe 60 or 70 ships at a time, more or less in the shape of Manhattan, long, skinny, bowed out in a little bit. And in front would be a destroyer and back would be a destroyer and maybe a cruiser, light cruiser. They would go out and what they would do was they would form up on the Hudson River again, right at the Lower Manhattan, quietly, and they would just form it for days, sometimes for weeks, quiet line of ships all the way to the George Washington Bridge. And then one morning you would get up, all gone. Under cover of darkness, slip out into the North Atlantic. No lights. In fact, I was told a story by the Provost of Barnard of Teachers College who told me that his mother and father, he was a Navy officer, a lieutenant, and she was a teacher in Wisconsin.
And they met at a hotel in New York for three days. There were other couples doing the same thing. And one day he said goodbye. Everybody knew where he was going. She and the other wives running the bus to Perth Amboy on the New Jersey shore, walked out at the end of a long pier, waited, could see these dark ships passing by, knowing that a person they loved was on those ships. It's amazing how little the people who shipped out really thought about New York. I mean, they enjoyed New York, including the brothels by the way, but they had stage door canteens. The most famous was on 44th Street, and they would've Broadway stars other people serving them coffee. You had to be in uniform. I don't think you could be an officer, but you came in, everything's free.
Some young woman would dance with you. They weren't supposed to go out with you. And sometimes that happened, but the deal was you don't date them. You're there to give them a hug or whatever. But the flips out of that was when they came home, they also come back mostly to the Port of New York. They come back in reverse order when they went over there. But those soldiers so desperate to come home. They would argue with them, I don't need a bed. I don't need a bump. And they actually slept in the swimming pools. There was almost no room to stand. And they came back. But they knew when they came to New York Harbor that was home and almost everybody would be on deck, sometimes 15,000. These big ocean liners would carry fewer than 2,000 passengers. But the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, as many as an entire army division, they looked like ants as they come into the harbor.
They want to see the Statue of Liberty. They want to see the skyscrapers. They want to see the fire boats. They want to see the welcoming crowds. It was a great moment for New York City. They had parades. The hundred first Airborne division, I think marched up. Broadway had a huge naval review in October where the Battleship Missouri, which where the Japanese had signed the surrender. Forget that though. I forget the name of the aircraft carrier that had been through the entire war. It was there all the way from Lower Manhattan to land with warships. Truman is on a destroyer, and the ships fire salutes. A thousand airplanes from Maine to Virginia fly overhead,. Closed off all the airspace, fly low. You could hardly hear anything because the drone of all those engines flying over the city. Those were welcome home.
Josh King:
You think about the view that those boys had as the ships were coming back, headed toward Times Square, headed toward that Alfred Eisenstaedt moment. Some of the things that they are seeing, maybe the buildings that were up there at the time, this building designed by George B. Post opened 1903 Equitable building designed by Ernest Graham opened in 1915, Chrysler designed by William Van Allen opened 1930. Even if you were to come back 20, 30 years after that Seagram building designed by Mies van der Rohe opened 1958. The evolution of the city's commercial architecture set the world's standard in the 20th century. When you walk through that concrete canyon of Broadway that the boys had walked down to have those parades, what did sort of the building and architectural significance of this city mean?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I think one thing we should emphasize is the city. One of the great secrets of New York is its openness to change. It's a commercial city in an industrial city now, a financial center and a different kind of internet kind of city second only to the Silicon Valley. And so in some ways, what's going on in the buildings has changed and the buildings, the city has been ... New York has more floor space, office space than everything else, than any three or four American cities, including Chicago. But the other thing I think is remarkable about New York is if you'd come back, let's say in 1925, you'd recognize the city. The buildings might be different, the economy might be different, but the subways stop in the same place. The streets go in the same order. There's still a midtown and a downtown. They're two different places. Downtown means something in New York, and most of them are ... You see them going downtown or up.
That's the same place. It's just downtown. In New York, it's different places. And it's really, I think, symbolic of the fact that New York has been a center of building, building things, not just building buildings, although that's why building bridges, there are, I want to say a thousand bridges in New York City, including the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge to George Washington Bridge, and now the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge and the George Washington Bridge and the Verrazano were all the longest suspension bridges in the world when they were built. Now there's one in Europe somewhere, but the city has been a remarkable place for architects and builders and unions that built things and highways, a major place, you don't think of New York with highways, but highways and subways. A lot of those immigrants who came over worked on building subways. They needed somebody to help them have a shovel. This is before you have dump trucks and all this other kind of stuff. We need strong backs. And a lot of those people had the backs to build the number one subway up Broadway, for example.
Josh King:
On the topic of highways, I mean, the history is so quite mixed if you think about it. I live currently in the West Village in a place called West Village Houses. It was constructed in the late '60s and early '70s, sort of a brainchild of a woman named Jane Jacobs. Her lifelong battle with Robert Moses defined two visions of New York City. I wanted to just hear a clip of Rick Burns' documentary on the urban fight of the century.
Speaker 10:
Hundreds of miles of parkways and expressways and dozens of bridges and tunnels now connected the city to the suburban reaches of Long Island and beyond. Hundreds more have been driven through the outer boroughs themselves, weaving together as Moses himself declared the loose strands and frayed edges of the metropolitan arterial tapestry. But in all the frenzy of construction, the master builder had never been able to penetrate the heart of Manhattan itself with a super highway.
Josh King:
Ken, what was Moses' obsession with the automobile? And what would New York have been if he had actually won that battle with Jacobs and built that super highway through Lower Manhattan?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I'm happy, as I'm sure you are, that he didn't build that road. But I think we needed to build roads. And Robert Moses was not a sweet man. Not everybody's best friend, maybe nobody's best friend, but he did build things on time, on budget, and he built them well. He built 13 big swimming pools. They're all still there. [inaudible 01:10:33] in Memphis are all destroyed. So Moses was clearly a phenomenon to talk about, and he didn't want to ... He wanted the Brooklyn battery tunnel to be a bridge. And he didn't like Franklin Roosevelt, who didn't like him either. But clearly my vision of the city is more attuned to Jane Jacobs who liked neighborhoods, who liked walking places, who liked diverse neighborhoods, who liked places to be open all the hours of the day and night so they would be safe, who believed in eyes on the street.
Moses really didn't think about that. Here he is the greatest planner of cities in America ever and he doesn't really like cities, but he didn't drive. He didn't have a driver's license. He drove everywhere. In fact, he drove into cars and he'd have a secretary taking notes as he was driving along. And then the car would pull over, the secretary would get out. The car behind him would disgorge that secretary. She'd come and sit beside him and take more notes, and he'd keep working. So he had a work ethic like nobody would believe. But I believe for all the problems of the Cross Bronx Expressway, and Lord goodness, it has problems, how can you not have a highway collecting Boston and San Francisco? You can't have stoplights every 200 feet. You just can't do it. Even though you still, every 200 feet, you may be stopping, maybe wish you had stoplights, but he brought New York into the 20th century, not only the UN Lincoln Center, hundreds of parks, a lot of roads, and New York is not the most road dominant.
I mean, despite what Moses did, still more New Yorkers use public transit than any other city in the United States by far. It's not even close. If everybody was in Manhattan today, came by car, then there'll be no buildings because they have to be all parking lots. And then there'd be no reason to come here anyway because it's just parking lots. So it has to have underground transportation. It probably also needs buses and taxis and all parts of this thing. But underground is key. It's got to move these tens of thousands of people.
Well, here's an interesting statistic. On the busiest travel day in the United States, which is around Christmas and Thanksgiving, the entire United States, the total of the volume of passengers is less than half of what the New York City subways take every day on an ordinary day. So a number of people that are moved is just astonishing and relatively safety. I mean, I know that we have publicized incidents of somebody getting pushed or trains getting derailed. Last night, there was a story of the train getting derailed in Brooklyn. Nobody was killed. A train was derailed. Meanwhile, there are hundred people killed in car crashes in the United States, probably thousands of wrecks. That's not news, but if something happens in New York, it becomes news.
Josh King:
Something happens in New York, it becomes news. We see a lot of New York on television, even in the dramatic television shows of the past decade, things like Mad Men and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, period pieces that paint one picture of New York in the '50s and '60s. But the real life stories can have people like Lenny Bruce and Bob Dylan to say nothing of Malcolm X, the effect of Vietnam and the Stonewall riots transformed what this city was forever. I just want to hear a little bit of contemporaneous reporting by Mike Wallace for CBS News.
Speaker 11:
Two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgusted, discomfort or fear. The CBS News public opinion survey indicates that sentiment is against permitting homosexual relationships between consenting adults without legal punishment. The severity of the punishment varies from state to state. The homosexual bitterly aware of his rejection responds by going underground. They frequent their own clubs and bars and coffee houses where they can escape the disapproving eye of the society that they call straight.
Josh King:
As we move into the 1970s, Ken, we have the succession of New York City under Mayors Lindsay, Beam and Koch. Where's the city headed?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
I think right after World War II, the city is going upward because its competitors, London and Paris, are impoverished. They can't afford to heat their apartments. Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, Vienna, other cultural capitals are bombed to hell. So New York is temporarily ... by itself is the top of the world really, and here's where the money is. And one thing that happens is the Metropolitan Opera, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Philharmonic, institutions that had been slightly looked down upon by the European elite before World War II. You don't want to look at them down on them after World War II because that's where the money is. And it was Leonard Friedman, George Balanchine, the dance and stuff like that, New York becomes the cultural capital. But already by the 1960s and '70s, white flight to the suburbs, Long Island especially, but Westchester, New Jersey and to the south and west is a big story.
The city is getting out of budget. The newcomers, somebody does take their place, but usually the newcomers from the rural south or from Puerto Rico don't have as much money and need more resources. The city is slow to respond, spends capital money on local expenses, continuing expenses. It reaches the bottom in the mid-nineteen '70s when it's actually bankrupt, it never technically goes bankrupt, but that's only because some real estate heavies and teachers unions prepay taxes so that the city doesn't have to actually go bankrupt. But then it turns. It turns unlike every other city in the Northeast and Midwest. It turns upward again. I think Koch has got something to do with it. When he takes over as mayor, the city is at the bottom, it's just practically bankrupt, white flight, everything is in full show. By the time he leaves 12 years later, the city's beginning to boom again.
He has something to do with that. He was proud. He felt that he was big enough to be mayor. It's a tough job, but I want this job and I'm going to do a good job. And I think the turnaround of New York from 1975, let's say to 2000, so even with the World Trade Center disaster, when many people thought now the city is doomed, who's going to ever want to go on a subway when somebody can blow it up or work in a tall building? People thought that, smart people thought that. Well, it turned out to be boom years. You wish you'd bought real estate then.
Josh King:
And look at what's happening out there today.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Yeah, that's right. Things are booming but they're coming back. They're coming back strongly. So I think that's important to remember. I think the mayor does make a difference. New York has a strong mayor. A lot of cities, mayors are not strong, but in New York City, the mayor is very strong. Controls the schools for example. I think the best mayor was Mike Bloomberg. Used to be the great mayor, was Fiorello La Guardia, who is a great mayor, was a great cheerleader. He was a fire plug of a man, a one man melting pot. And Ed Koch was very, very good. But Bloomberg got the city when people thought it was on its rear because of the World Trade Center, because of fear. And by the time he left, he'd bequeathed a multibillion dollar surplus to Bill de Blasio. COVID is another matter.
Josh King:
I want to talk about that specifically. You mentioned Dan Doctoroff earlier and Mike Bloomberg. From a business standpoint, the company that owns this business, Intercontinental Exchange and Bloomberg compete head-to-head in the financial data business. But as a mayor, and if you think about the transformations that have happened about the city, Hudson River Park near where I live, the High Line, the Barclays Center, which has brought so much life to Brooklyn, even Hudson Yards and the rebuild of the World Trade Center and the Oculus that happened that was begun and pushed through by Mayor Bloomberg. What's the alchemy that have allowed all these projects to flourish and succeed?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I think Mike Bloomberg, first of all, he didn't take a salary. Obviously, he didn't need it. And so I think the general public expectation or feeling about him was he wasn't in this to steal money. So unlike so many politicians, he doesn't care about that. He wants to do the right thing. I think he hired good people and he gave them leeway to do their job. Every decision they made didn't have to be run through him. I think in Dan Doctoroff, he had an exceptionally able visionary doer who took what Mike Bloomberg endorsed. He didn't get to Olympics, but almost everything else they wanted to do, including Hudson Yards, including the High Line, including especially building affordable housing. What New York's big problem is right now is housing. It does not have enough of it. It needs to build more tall buildings, not fewer, because more people want to live here and the price is too high because there's not enough product.
In a business sense, you want to drop the price on popsicles, sell more popsicles on the court, and the price will fall. We could build a million new housing units miraculously, even if they were luxury units, the price of everything would fall. It's simple Economics 101, but we need it. And that's a big thing. And Dan Doctoroff and Mike Bloomberg did a lot for that, that they don't usually get credit for. But I think the city's 21st century rebuild is almost as spectacular as its growth in the late 19th century or between the wars. New York City somehow takes the opportunity, the crisis, the challenge, and often turns it to its advantage. And that's what it teaches us. That's something, maybe it's a thing about capitalism or freedom or individual initiative, but if you don't do your job well, somebody else will do it for you.
Josh King:
My wife works for the New York Police Department as a psychologist. She had to report to work in the midst of COVID and in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder and the defund the police movement. As much as I want to be the eternal optimist, sort of like thinking about our 21st century rebuild, I feel a little bit of a different New York now, Ken, than the one that rose and was rebuilt after 9/11 where the sidewalks and subways aren't maybe quite as safe as I felt that they were under Bloomberg. What's required, do you think, to help New York rewrite the next great chapter for its next 400 years?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I think it needs to continue to be a place of toleration, a place of opportunity, a place of acceptance, a place that rewards effort, a place where it's possible to raise a child and send them to public schools with happiness and satisfaction. I think we don't realize right now, my hometown, as you mentioned, was Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis has six, 700,000 people. It's one 12th or 13th the size of New York. It has more homicides than New York City did in 2023. New York is not just 17% safer. It's got fewer homicides than Los Angeles or Chicago. Chicago is the third the size. LA is less than half the size. And so I mean, the city needs to be a safe place. If you don't feel safe in your bed at night ... The New York Police Department is exceptional. And the fire department, they're probably both the best operators in the world.
I don't think we get enough credit to the fire department. We haven't had a fire, you'll probably get comments on this, since 1835. That was the great fire of New York. That was before the fire department existed. And since 1865 when it came into existence, there has not been a fire in New York City that was out of control. World Trade Center is exceptional, and that's not a fire. Those are airplane crashes full of things that it's not their fault. So that's a remarkable story in New York of relative safety. When all these buildings are contiguous, the insides of them are made out of wood and sometimes a lot of them are a hundred years old anymore. And the city didn't burn down. I was once, don't ask me what I was doing on the corner of 8th Avenue and 44th Street 30 years ago, and I remember with another urban historian, we were standing in what was in a questionable area, and suddenly flames were coming out of a second and third story windows across the street.
And I thought, "Golly, I'm going to see a really big fire now." And I watched, I stood across the street, the fire engines came, within a couple minutes, put the fire out, the firemen were on the street, they didn't even act like they'd done anything. And I thought I was going to see a conflagration. "Just put out a fire. That's what we just did." But anyway, it's a safe city both in terms of fire and other things. It's a generally well-run city. We haven't had a mayor, an openly corrupt mayor since the 1920s, and that was Jimmy Walker. We've had mayors who were not as great as others, but there's a lot of good things about New York, a lot of wonderful public servants and the people who are good at running the city, like I think Bloomberg and [inaudible 01:24:22] recognize that those people who work for the city are city employees. They're good at what they do, and they care about the city, and you need to listen to them. And I think they listened.
Josh King:
I'd like to end our conversation where you ended your talk at Federal Hall. I want to call on the words of one of the world's great storytellers, E.B. White, and his legendary essay, Here is New York.
Speaker 12:
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of the considerable section of the population. For the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent, strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual or it can fulfill him depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
Josh King:
Ken, what do White's words written 75 years ago mean to you today?
Dr. Ken Jackson:
Well, I think White is ... he's on target. New York is not an easy place. It's not a gracious place, but it is a place that will reward you. The cultural opportunities are really matchless in the world. I think New York really is the cultural capital of the world now. If you're a dance company, you don't become world-class until you face the New York critics. It's not everybody's cup of tea. I suspect not one person in five would love New York City. It's too crowded, it's too noisy, it's too dense, it's too dirty. But for those people, New York is a place not just to love, but to be in love with it. The challenge, the change, the density, the diversity, the magic of the city. Something E.B. White realized that you could get in the city, and there's so many people who really are in love with the city, who can't imagine living anywhere else.
Oh, they try it somewhere. But even the people who leave and they live in Salt Lake City or Dubuque or Portland, Oregon, there's always a piece of them that's in New York City. They know where the A train goes. They feel like there's some part of them. So if there's an incident there, they say, "I've been in a big city where something really happens. And so I think we can handle this problem here in Memphis or wherever we are." So I think New York, it's there for all of us. We need New York just like we need the United States. The world needs the United States as some place to say, "You can come here. We don't care who you are." And New York City is a place that we need because it says, "We don't care whether you're Black. We don't care if you're gay. We don't care if you're female. We don't care who you are, what you are, you're welcome here."
Josh King:
You're welcome here. New York City here for all of us. Thanks so much, Ken for joining us inside the ICE House on this our 400th episode, celebrating 400 years of New York City.
Dr. Ken Jackson:
I'm so pleased that I was part of the 400th.
Josh King:
That is our conversation for this week. Our guest was Dr. Kenneth T. Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History at Columbia University. If you like what you heard, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, make sure to leave a review. Email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Lance Glynn with production assistance, editing and engineering from Ken Abel. Pete Ash is the Director of Programming and Production for ICE and the NYSE. And I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
